What if someone were to tell you your vote doesn’t count? That in the historically true-blue state of Connecticut at least, showing up to the poles doesn’t matter, the results are already predicted months before they occur. Forget predicted, what if you found out they could be manipulated? While the average US citizen couldn’t tell you what the word ‘gerrymandering’ means, the increase in this political tactic across the United States should start to raise concern among our greater population.
David Daley ’88, author of best-sellers Ratf*cked, Unrigged, and Antidemocratic, paid a visit to our community last Thursday to talk about his personal work and research on gerrymandering across the United States. Popularly used by politicians within state governments to manipulate district governments, gerrymandering is the act of politicians redrawing state district lines to numerically favor one political party over the other, often to guarantee a party seat from that district.
The danger this poses to the average citizen, is it significantly decreases the importance of people’s votes. If your democratic city gets districted into 4 sections down the middle, each including another sector of your state that is (let’s say) republican, despite the party trend of the city, the way the lines are drawn, and the relative population distribution would cause the republican party to gain the seats of representation from those districts. Therefore, even if the entire city were to go out and vote, their votes would be overruled. Or in other words, wouldn’t really count.
A point of note from Mr. Daley that raises my personal cause for concern, is the rapid increase that this is occurring at, right under the noses of the public and certainly being turned a blind eye to by the recent executive administrations. Looking back at the past presidential and legislative branch elections, the variation in the “party of power” has had historically close races. Just this year, there is a 5-seat difference in the house of representatives between Democrats and Republicans, a difference that could easily be changed or manipulated further apart or closer together by strategic planning of district lines…
So why isn’t there federal jurisdiction over this? A question many of us were asking Mr. Daley, who simply agreed with this call to action. Politicians know it happens, yet nothing makes it directly illegal, despite the arguably antidemocratic nature of this practice. In fact, one county pulling a move like this encourages similar behavior from another party. Daley talked specifically about Texas (Rep.) and California (Dem.) cancelling out each other’s moves, a very “if he’s doing it why shouldn’t I?” mentality. An increasing downward spiral of behavior among US county’s that is not one to be particularly proud of. As the 2028 election approaches, it is vital to the future of US democracy for Gerrymandering officials to be held accountable.
